GW2 - Inflation

I have some concerns regarding this matter. A big part of a MMORPG is the economy. We know that Guild Wars 2 will have serverwide auction houses. We also know that you will gain money from npc kills and completing dynamic events.

Usually in this context we usually talk about gold-sinks as a way to combat inflation. In WoW classic gold-sinks was abilities, mounts, vanity items and consumables. These are items that take gold out of the economy.

This is because that in order for gold to have any meaning there must be a demand for it. The demand is created by the players need to spend it on other stuff. If there are too much gold in circulation the value of the gold diminishes and you will need larger quantities to buy other players items. If inflation rises enough players will stop trusting gold and start trading items for other items. I experiences this back when i played Lineage2. End result is that gold becomes worthless.

The downside to keeping the demand for gold high is that it can result in forcing players to grind. Remember WoW classic epic mount, grinding some 600g as I recall it. It was fine for those who logged on to grind, but for some players this wasn't fun.

In the end I hope GW2 will succeed in creating an economy where gold will have value but you won't be forced into earning it in ways that you dislike.

Some loose thoughts:
Taxation on gold account forcing players to have their accumulated wealth bound in assets, also transaction taxation in form of auction house fees.
Item scaling so that the many would have easy access to enough and the few would be able to distinguish them self by hard earned vanity items.
looking forward to your input

"I want gold to have value, but i want any items ingame that require a substantial amount of it available to me without any effort beside normal gameplay, aka i want so much gold to fall in my pockets without effort that i can even buy stuff like epic mounts just like that".

Am i the only one seeing an issue with this?

---------- Post added 2012-01-30 at 04:08 PM ----------

Originally Posted by Neglesh

I could be wrong, but from what I remember it didn't seem to expensive.

I think I remember seeing some places costing around 15-30 silver?

Although I have no idea how easy gold/silver/copper is easy to obtain :P[COLOR="red"]

I think he was talking about the master riding level which costs 5.000 (gets reduced by rep to.. 4k gold? or something).

Designers these days are probably pretty knowledgeable about these things. Technically inflation is not an issue as long as players can store enough gold on their characters and it doesn't run absolutely rampant like in Zimbabwe a few years back. Even WoW inflation got to a point where they significantly increased the cap - I think some of the trading card game stuff was being sold for "several gold caps", no source on this one though, might be just hearsay.

I could be wrong, but from what I remember it didn't seem to expensive.

I think I remember seeing some places costing around 15-30 silver?

Although I have no idea how easy gold/silver/copper is easy to obtain :P

---------- Post added 2012-01-31 at 02:05 AM ----------

Yeah I remember finally clicking the "train" button and just sitting back in my chair like; "Thank fuck".

Kinda offtopic, but IIRC they didn't make it so that you "train" your mount til' 2.0 patch.. it was the actual mount that costed.. (the training was like 20g)
And it was uhm... 800 gold? something like that.. even 900 perhaps.

Taxation on gold account forcing players to have their accumulated wealth bound in assets, also transaction taxation in form of auction house fees.

Off topic out of context quoting, go.
Anyways, most of your gold in GW1 was generally in ectos, if you had a decent amount of it. But that was because there was a limit of a meager 100k that you could hold, meaning you weren't able to trade more than 100k for an item. With rare enough items going for thousands of ectos.. so your wealth was in assets instead of currency, but there ended up being one main 'asset' that everyone used as currency anyways, so it just ended up replacing currency.

(basically what I'm saying is taxes wouldn't do much but punish the poor, as the rich would just find something else to use as currency)

Kinda offtopic, but IIRC they didn't make it so that you "train" your mount til' 2.0 patch.. it was the actual mount that costed.. (the training was like 20g)
And it was uhm... 800 gold? something like that.. even 900 perhaps.

I could be wrong, but from what I remember it didn't seem to expensive.

I think I remember seeing some places costing around 15-30 silver?

Although I have no idea how easy gold/silver/copper is easy to obtain :P

Doesn't really matter how expensive it is. With the ease of fast-traveling people will likely use it a lot and gold will trickle away. Flightpaths or repair costs in WoW aren't all that expensive (relatively speaking), but they're still gold sinks.

In Classic all the quests rewarded you with silvers, some group quests, dungeon quests maybe few golds. All the items in AH, cost very little as well, with exceptions for some important quest related things, like crusader orbs or nexus crystals. You often came to situation where you didn't have enough money to learn new skills/spells, at least you did if you were quite lazy quest-doer like I was. The money sinks, like already mentioned mounts, were a pain indeed - while earning only silvers, you had to save many hundreds of golds to buy an epic mount (or skill later on). Comparing AH prices vs money sink prices was like comparing a hot dog and a house in terms of value.

Coming of TBC changed things a little bit. Even tho the epic flying skill, even with reputation discount (I think it was 4250 golds then) was quite difficult, the money was much easier acquirable, which led to prices going up a lot. Quests granted few golds upon completion, there were rarely any problems with saving enough for skills/spells. But even then, thanks to epic fly form things kept quite normal.

In my opinion Wrath of the Lich king was the time when everything broke down to pieces. For each quest you could get up to 10 golds and sometimes even more (can't vouch for the numbers - might be slightly different), no new flying skills, except for northrend flying, which was quite cheap anyway. All the skills/spells were easily purchasable. AH prices went up once again.

Everything might sound ok, but the problem is (once again, it is only my opinion - not trying to rage anyone here) that money sinks relatively to player income/prices in AH became too trivial. If in classic you were getting 10 coins for the quests and had to save 10'000 coins for mount, then in WotLK you earned 1000 coins from each quest, while the only few things you really needed (and could only get from vendors not other players) cost 20'000 coins. All the numbers are relative and coins should not be perceived as golds, but the idea is simple - over time money indeed got less valuable, cause game didn't offer enough necessary things to spend it on.

I remember there were different kinds of things - like Haris Pilton offered the huge bag for sale, there were expensive "luck necklace" in Shattrath city and there were other things in WotLK as well. But all these things (including gear, accessories, bags etc,etc) are just show-off things, not necessity which means not everyone will do/buy/use them.

I don't really see a point in gold inflation and gold sinks. It seems to cater to those who go out of there way for mass amounts of money without spending which isn't the entire community.

In other mmo's I don't really go out of my way to get mass amounts of gold for that "special" mount which really isn't special just for the rich, I just don't spend my money and buy things I need (potions, gear, etc) and I never seem to have an over surplus of gold sometimes I don't have enough.

Short version: Gold sinks don't matter it caters to people who only farm gold for a living.

If people are worried about gold inflating (where everyone has a lot of gold and everything is cheap) that is a design problem with rewards giving too much gold and the market selling everything just cheap. Gold sinks don't fix those problems.

In wow we have gold sinks, vial for the sands for example sells for 40k which is a lot to most players. Does that fix peoples problems of over surplus of gold? No, people still have a lot of gold and that doesn't break a dent in their savings.... oh look the key word of the day savings.

It is like real life, some people just don't spend their money they earn on anything but bills so they have more money then they actually need to survive, but that does change the value of one dollar?

If people are worried about gold inflating (where everyone has a lot of gold and everything is cheap) that is a design problem with rewards giving too much gold and the market selling everything just cheap. Gold sinks don't fix those problems.

In wow we have gold sinks, vial for the sands for example sells for 40k which is a lot to most players. Does that fix peoples problems of over surplus of gold? No, people still have a lot of gold and that doesn't break a dent in their savings.... oh look the key word of the day savings.

You can't blame the game for the market, that's the community that affects the market. If the game gives too much money for rewards then its a game problem. Since we don't know how much gold rewards gives on average and what the market is like in GW2 worry about gold inflation before the game is released is pointless.

You can't blame the game for the market, that's the community that affects the market. If the game gives too much money for rewards then its a game problem. Since we don't know how much gold rewards gives on average and what the market is like in GW2 worry about gold inflation before the game is released is pointless.

Unfortunatly there is no way to perfectly balance the gold production with gold sinks in an MMO. If the sinks are too strong money slowly trickles out of the economy till its gone or worse never works into the system at all as players start with nothing. if they are not strong enough you get steady inflation. The only way you could balance it is if the gold rewards and the gold sinks fluidly changed based on the amount of gold in the system but then that impacts new players harder than those that have been around a while and already have gold. Chargeing more to those with money does not work as they'd simply "Hide" the money on alts or second accounts and keep a relitivly low amount of gold in their pockets.